This is a blog post by Jeremy Nicholls, CEO at Social Value UK and Social Value International
Whether data is rigorous enough is a common discussion amongst social impact analysts, social accountants and evaluators. And the great thing is that it is always possible to argue that it’s not. Which may be fun in arguments but becomes a massive problem if we ever want the group of people who we want to use this information to ever make a decision using it. And that’s all they hear, its not good enough, we need more resource to make it better, the sample size is too small, not representative, the approach to causality, assuming there is one for a moment, is inadequate and could even increase the risk and so on…